


Growing Wild

by frumplebump



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Birthday, Family, Gen, Kids, Minor Original Character(s), One Shot, Post-Canon, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-05-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:34:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24185983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frumplebump/pseuds/frumplebump
Summary: Malik teaches Isis's daughters to make flower crowns on his oldest niece's tenth birthday.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 7





	Growing Wild

**Author's Note:**

> Avid watchers of the YGO DM anime might remember a flashback where lil Malik holds up a wreath of flowers, despite having never left the tomb at that point in his life. Here's my brain's attempt to make something meaningful out of that implausible throwaway shot.

Summer torpor and the upside-down feeling of jet lag clung to Malik as he reclined on the couch in Isis’s apartment. It was early July, ruthlessly hot and radiant with incessant sunshine. The dry heat was a nice change from the oppressive humidity of Japan’s rainy season, though normally he visited Egypt during milder months. But his oldest niece was turning ten today, and he couldn’t be anywhere else.

Despite the afternoon warmth nearly overwhelming the air conditioner, he savored a cup of blistering-hot coffee, sighing as it burned the fog from his brain. Isis made her coffee brutally strong these days; Malik suspected that, with three kids, she had been running on pure caffeine for years.

From the kitchen came the _thunk_ of something heavy falling to the floor, followed by a sharp admonishment from Isis and the voices of her two younger daughters whining in protest. Malik winced, chuckling sympathetically, then turned his attention back to his phone.

A moment later, there was a scuffling sound in the doorway of the living room, followed by a petulant voice announcing, “Mama said we have to come play with you.”

Malik glanced up. His six-year-old niece, Fayruz, rocked from foot to foot, her arms clasped behind her and her lower lip jutting out in a pout. Her little sister stood next to her, tugging at the hem of Fayruz’s shirt.

“ _Stop_ it, Yasmin!” Fayruz snapped, yanking free of her sister’s grasp and shoving her hard enough to make the three-year-old girl stumble. Yasmin responded with a long wail that was building up to a full-blown meltdown until Isis interrupted.

“Girls, please.” Isis’s voice was taut as a wire, and her eyes cracked with lightning. Malik had learned to dread that look, and was impressed when Fayruz only folded her arms and tossed her head. “Malik, would you mind?” Isis asked. She pushed a strand of hair back from her forehead with her wrist; her hands were powdered in flour. “Just entertain them long enough for me to get this cake into the oven.”

“Sure,” Malik said warily, draining the last of his coffee.

“Thank you.” Isis glared down at her daughters. “If I hear one more whine or shriek from either of you…” She let the threat trail off into unsettling ambiguity, then flashed Malik a wink before going back to the kitchen.

Fayruz continued to pout. “I just wanted to help,” she informed Malik, sounding both bruised and haughty.

“Me too,” Yasmin chirped.

“Well, _you’re_ too small, that’s why you spilled the sugar.”

Yasmin’s eyes welled with tears and her lip started to tremble.

“Let’s find something else to do,” Malik blurted, trying to head off another tantrum. He cast his eyes around the apartment for inspiration, and noticed the armful of grocery store bouquets that Isis had shoved into a pitcher of water before getting distracted by some more urgent demand. “I know. Let’s make flower crowns.”

“Why?” Fayruz asked.

“Because it will be fun. You can give one to Leila to wear when she gets home from school, since she’s the birthday girl.”

Yasmin’s eyes lit up at the idea, but Fayruz took a moment to ponder Malik’s suggestion before deciding, “Okay.”

Malik got the girls settled on the floor around the coffee table and unfurled the plastic wrap from the bouquets, spreading the flowers across the table. The wash of vibrant petals glowed like a multicolored mosaic, rich and inviting, and he smiled when Fayruz’s dubious expression softened into delight.

He picked up two of the pink carnations and gazed at them for a moment. “Let’s see if I remember how to do this.” His fingers moved with some combination of muscle memory and instinct, bending one of the stems in a loop around the other, then tucking it back in on itself to make a loose knot.

His nieces studied him intently. Fayruz attempted to copy him, her tongue poking between her teeth as she concentrated. “Like that?”

“That’s right,” Malik said. “Now you just…” He grabbed another flower and threaded it around the first two stems. “Keep adding to the chain until it’s long enough to go around your head, like a crown.”

Fayruz nodded solemnly, contemplating the pile of flowers on the table. 

Yasmin, meanwhile, was whimpering. “I can’t,” she whined, trying to twist the stems together, and flinging them to the table when they sprang apart in her hands.

“Let’s work together, Yasmin,” Malik said. “You pick which flowers, and I’ll connect them for you.” He did what he could to tie the stems that Yasmin had reduced to pulpy shreds. Yasmin beamed when she saw him succeed, and pushed a white gerbera at him.

“How come you know how to do this, Uncle Malik?” Fayruz asked.

“Your mom taught me, when we were kids.” When they were kids, buried alive in a tomb, and he’d never seen a flower growing wild, had no concept of roots or rain or the rich, green smell of living plants.

Sometimes a bouquet of cut flowers would be tucked into the supplies delivered by the lesser members of the tribe who were allowed to circulate in the outside world. When their mother was alive, Rishid said, there were flowers every week, but by the time Malik was old enough to remember, the bouquets had become a rare surprise. Wasting a whole pitcher of fresh water just to keep some plants alive was too much of an indulgence, so they usually strung them into garlands or wreaths that still looked pretty even after the flowers died and withered. Isis knew how to knot the stems together because their mother had taught her. The first time she showed Malik how to do it, she looked so sad that, with five-year-old logic, he decided to cheer her up by offering her his completed garland as a gift. It was too big to wear as a crown; it slipped down to Isis’s shoulders, like a necklace. The petals were the color of gold and ivory and coral, but to Malik and his sister, they were more exotic and precious than gems.

“Now pink.” Yasmin’s voice pulled him back, and he blinked as she bounced a flower impatiently against his fingers. “Then purple, and then pink, and then pink again.”

Fayruz held up her strand of blossoms, wrapping it loosely around her head to check the length. “Is this good?”

“It’s beautiful.” Malik showed her how to tie the ends together with another stem to finish the crown. As she was holding up her creation to admire it, her face glowing with pride, they heard the front door unlatching.

“Leila!” Fayruz and Yasmin shrieked. They darted out of the living room together and returned tugging their big sister by both hands. Leila still wore her school backpack and a dazed expression, but she smiled when she saw Malik and the pile of flowers.

“I made this for you!” Fayruz grabbed her crown off the table and held it aloft. “A birthday crown.” She stood on tiptoes to settle the flowers onto her sister’s head.

“Thanks,” Leila murmured with a shy grin, rolling her eyes up to try to see the petals jutting out above her forehead.

Isis followed her eldest daughter into the room. “I see you’ve all been busy,” she said.

“Uncle Malik taught us to make flower crowns,” Yasmin crowed. She pointed to the nearly-completed wreath in Malik’s hands. “This one is for you, Mama!”

“For me? How kind of you.” Isis smiled at Malik. Something soft and sad flickered beneath it; Malik recognized the old grief, the bittersweet ache of remembering their childhood. Then her expression brightened, like someone throwing back the curtains in a dim room. “I’m impressed that you remember how to do that, Malik.”

“What, you think I don’t sit at home making these every weekend to keep my skills sharp?” He added the last of the flowers Yasmin had laid out, then looped the strand into a wreath and finished it off. With a grin, he stood up and placed the crown on his sister’s head. The vivid colors Yasmin had chosen shone against Isis’s sleek black hair.

“Mama, you’re beautiful!” Yasmin cried, clapping her hands.

Isis adjusted a petal that hung too close to her eye. “Thank you, sweetheart. You and Uncle Malik made me a very lovely crown to wear.”

“I picked out all the flowers, but I couldn’t put them together so Uncle Malik did that. But I chose _all_ the flowers,” she declared, then plopped back down beside the coffee table, where her sisters were toying with the remaining blossoms.

“Sorry for requisitioning your bouquets,” Malik murmured to Isis.

She shook her head. “Completely worth it. Thanks for keeping them busy.”

“I don’t understand how you manage,” Malik said.

“What, spending time with my kids doesn’t make you want two or three of your own?” Isis bumped his arm with her own. “If they had cousins to play with, they would keep themselves entertained.”

Malik snorted. “You know there’s about a dozen reasons that’s not going to happen.” He kept his tone light, though they both knew that high on the list was his unending struggle with the shadowed, quicksand parts of his own mind.

In a wordless apology, she pressed a light kiss against his cheek, the flower petals tickling Malik’s temple as she leaned in. “My girls are lucky to have you as their uncle, just as you are.”

Malik’s nieces spent the rest of the afternoon making bracelets and necklaces out of the leftover flowers. Only Leila and their mother should have the honor of wearing crowns for the day, they decided, but Fayruz and Yasmin adorned themselves with blossom jewelry. They gave Malik one of the bracelets, and chased down the family cat to stuff her into a short-lived collar. By the time their father Samir got home from work, they were down to a handful of flowers too short to weave together, so Leila slipped a few of them into his shirt pocket. They offered Rishid the same when he arrived for dinner, but he made them shriek delightedly by opting to tuck the flowers behind his ears instead.

“You look beautiful,” Malik chuckled as he sat beside Rishid at the dining table.

“It suits me, right?” Rishid adjusted the slightly battered gerbera resting against the scars on his face. “I’m a little envious of your bracelet, though.”

Malik held out his wrist, twisting it to admire the blossoms wrapped around it. “Well, I did teach them to do this, and I provided manual labor for Yasmin. It’s fair compensation.”

“You taught them?” Rishid smiled. “I figured it was Isis. I remember you two making garlands, back then… You were so proud of yourself when you figured it out.”

“And now I’m passing on the family tradition.” Malik managed half a smile as he looked at Leila, still wearing the crown her sister had woven for her.

After dinner was finished and the dishes cleared away, Isis ducked into the kitchen to light the candles on the cake, then Fayruz led them all in singing “Happy Birthday.” Leila watched the glowing cake approach with a tentative smile. When the song ended, she held her hair back, took a deep breath, and blew out each candle with deliberate care. She giggled at the applause that followed when she extinguished all ten in one go.

The cake was vanilla with layers of strawberry jam and thick frosting, assembled with Isis’s exacting precision. It looked bakery-perfect, and Malik complimented her on it, even though he could barely taste it. With every passing moment he felt an invisible tide tugging him away from the present; memories coiled around his ankles and dragged at his wrists like seaweed twisting in dark water. Though he tried to resist them—gods knew he’d spent enough time ruminating on his trauma, and today was about Leila, not him—he was still startled when a nudge from Rishid bumped him back into reality.

He realized that everyone was getting up from the table to watch Leila unwrap her pile of gifts, and shuffled to the living room with the rest of the family. Malik had gotten her a necklace from a department store back in Japan, an enameled sunflower pendant hanging from a gold-plated chain. Leila gasped when she opened the box and thanked him with her usual sweet politeness, and he hoped that his reply sounded equally cheerful and light to her.

As she moved on to her other presents, chattering to her sisters, Rishid crossed the living room to stand beside Malik. “Everything okay?” Rishid murmured, his eyes still on their nieces.

Malik’s fingertips tingled as if his soul wasn’t seated quite right in his body, but Rishid’s attention steadied him. He offered his brother a smile, and tried to ease the conversation away from himself. “Doesn’t it feel like Leila was only born a few years ago? I still have such a clear memory of holding her the day she came home—she was so unbelievably tiny. And now she’s ten. How did that happen?”

Rishid chuckled. “I know what you mean. Ten years isn’t really that much time anymore, is it?”

Malik watched Leila’s face light up as she unwrapped a box containing a set of pastel-colored unicorn figurines. She squealed with delight as Fayruz proudly announced that she had picked that present out for Leila herself, and wrapped it too.

“She’s still so young,” Malik said quietly. Never mind the fact that he could vividly remember the day he met her, three days old, a little warm bundle with a full head of hair. Sitting here, wearing a wilting flower crown, her eyes glittering with excitement at the sight of plastic toys, she was clearly still just a little kid. “Gods, she’s so young.”

Ten years old had been the threshold of adulthood for him. On one side he was a child, and then there was the Initiation, and then his childhood unravelled into tattered shreds. He hadn’t wanted to grow up then, but he couldn’t ignore the burn of unhealed scars and the tickle of kohl around his eyes, insisting that he had duties to assume. Now, as he watched his niece playing with her sisters, the visceral wrongness of it found a fresh angle to punch into his gut. How could anyone bind a ten-year-old _child_ face-down and dip a blade into a candle flame and—

Rishid put his hand on Malik’s shoulder. “The way she smiles has always reminded me of how you smiled when you were little,” he said.

Malik looked at Leila. He didn’t see much of himself in his even-tempered, eager-to-please niece, but maybe there was a ghost of what he’d lost flickering in the easy joy that lit Leila’s eyes. After all, Malik shared his blood with her and her sisters, and they were the closest he cared to get to having offspring. As the daughter of a daughter, the Ishtar clan’s burden would not have been Leila’s to bear, but she was still the firstborn of the first generation of their line that would never know the Initiation. She’d never know the knife; she’d never know the echoing pain of treating her sibling’s bleeding wounds. Tomorrow, she would still be a child.

Leila seemed to feel the weight of her uncle’s gaze on her, and she glanced up at him. Her crown slipped down her brow and she giggled as she pushed the drooping blossoms away from her eyes. The smile she gave Malik, precious and alive, gleamed like flowers growing wild in the open air.


End file.
